I had this thought yesterday as I drove home from work: If the heart of Pentecostalism could merge with the mind of Presbyterianism, the results could be incredible! Just before leaving work I had been in conversation with a student who calls himself an atheist, but who is graciously, and curiously, engaging me in conversation. During our first conversation some weeks ago, he mentioned a series of YouTube videos made by a 20-something who was raised as a Pentecostal Christian, but has since become an atheist. The videos tell the story of his deconversion. He is a sharp young man, and I am very intrigued, and at times challenged, by the case for disbelief that he builds in the videos. But something that had been latent in the whole series struck me forcefully yesterday as I watched the video entitled “Losing God,” in which he narrates the climactic crisis point in his turn away from faith.
It’s clear that he never wanted to lose God. But he found
himself in conversation with a learned linguistics scholar whom he calls “The
Professor.” The Professor had gone through his own deconversion earlier in
life. At first, he warned the young inquirer not to go down the path he was
starting on, knowing where it might lead. But after sensing his determination
to seek Truth, The Professor told him to sit down, relax and listen. Listen he
did, and The Professor’s arguments appeared logically sound and even
complementary to what he had been learning in his university studies. Finally,
he reached a point of such cognitive dissonance, on so many levels, that he
just couldn’t hold it together. At this point, he sinks into despair. He’s
yearning for the kind of experiences of God that he had in his youth, which had
been the primary basis of his faith. The longer they don’t come, the lower he
descends. All the while he is still going to church; he doesn’t want to give up
belief.
His faith, before all this started, was typical of many in
the Pentecostal tradition: authentic, emotional and grounded in experience.
Throughout his devconversion journey thus far, he’d all but lost the feelings
he used to have. He stopped hearing God’s voice, feeling God’s Spirit, and experiencing
God in prayer. He longed for these things, but didn’t know how to recover them.
He prayed, but nothing came. At his deepest point of crisis, when he felt the
weight of the world was on his shoulders, he went to his parents. He hoped his
dad would have “a core of faith underpinned in wisdom that could at least start
to help me sort through these issues and get back to God.” Unfortunately, he
did not. Instead, when asked how he would respond if someone showed him
evidence that the Bible was historically wrong, he said, “Well I would tell
them that’s not what I believe, and if they didn’t like it, that was their
problem. And if they were gonna tell me crap like that, I wouldn’t talk to ‘em
anymore.” But what if it was true? “Jesus told us to live by faith and that he
would bring us salvation. He never said, I will give you the truth.”
Apart this statement’s flat contradiction of Jesus’ own
claim to be the Truth, and John’s
claim that he came “full of Grace and Truth,” these statements typify the
anti-intellectual, don’t-ask-questions-just-believe kind of perspective that
often passes for authentic God-honoring faith in contemporary post-revivalist,
post-fundamentalist evangelicalism and that is particularly prevalent in
Pentecostal and Charismatic circles.
Now, before you hear an arrogant criticism of “those
uninformed Pentecostals” by someone who thinks he’s arrived at some higher
spiritual plane through intellectual study, let me swiftly say that that is not
my point. Those, like Pentecostals, who have a deeper awareness of and
attunement to the things of the Spirit have taught me much in my journey to a
more complete and generous orthodoxy, and I believe they have much to teach
much of the Western church, which has mummified the spiritual life of faith and
obedience in a layers of rationalist, post-enlightenment (and post-modern)
scholarship that have torn the history out of the Bible, cut God out of the
gospel, and ripped the heart out of the faith. It is some of these same
academic arguments that castigated the faith of the young man in the videos.
But the solution to rationalist scholarship is not to a thoughtless (and
fearful?) retreat back to “God said it. I believe it. That settles it!” The
solution is good scholarship!
What if, in a world where the enemy is working all the
angles to subvert the Christian faith, we had more people who have a heart and a mind dedicated to God. Perhaps we
need thoughtful believers and faithful thinkers. Some of the men I
most admire are shining examples of this marriage of mind and heart:
Pentecostals like Gordon Fee, Craig Keener and James Dunn; Anglicans like N. T.
Wright, Chris Wright, Scot McKnight, Richard Bauckham and the late John Stott;
and brilliant apologists like Peter Kreeft, J.P. Moreland, and Timothy Keller.
What if, when this young man was enduring his crisis of
faith, he’d had found a faithful man in his church (which he continued to
attend) who had the intellectual capacity to walk with him through his doubt, the
patience to listen to his questions and discuss reasonable answers, and the
interest to suggests books by people like those named above, which would
present reasonable responses to the arguments he encountered in books
recommended by The Professor, arguments which systematically dismantled every
aspect of the young man’s faith – everything from prayer to the reliability of the
Bible to the “experience” of God, to the very reality of God.
The videos hint that there was more going on in this young
man than simply being persuaded by a series of rational arguments. (It seems
there always is.) But what if a mature mentor had given him some intellectually
satisfying reasons to believe at that defining moment in his life, when, as he
says, “my mind broke free from my prohibition from using logic,” which led to
feeling like “I was losing the most important thing in my life. As the poison
of these ideas coursed through my veins, I tried to resist it, but I couldn’t.
It just made too much sense. . . I was beginning to enter a stage in my life
were I simply couldn’t believe in God anymore no matter how hard I tried. I
laid on my couch and prayed again, my hands over my eyes, but it didn’t feel
like anyone was listening anymore.”
In God’s seeming silence, in the absence of the feelings and
experiences that used to assure us, we need others to come alongside us and
believe with us and for us. In this story, no one did that. In the war of
worldviews, atheism claimed another victory. Another of our young people moved
out into the big world and encountered its big ideas, with their appearance of
wisdom, and found that his Sunday School faith was insufficient for the
onslaught. Oh, that a wise believer had been there to help!
The moral I wish to draw out of this story is nothing new:
we need each other. We need to learn from the things our brothers and sisters
in other parts of the church are doing well. We need to abandon the arrogance
that says we can win the war if we “just believe” and the arrogance that says we’re too smart to believe that the war
really is spiritual. At the end of the day, we need to obey what Jesus said is
the first and greatest commandment, to “love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” or, as Scot
McKnight renders it, “love God with every molecule and globule” – both those in
the emotional control centers of our brain, and
those in the intellectual center of our being. Lord, help us to follow you with
every faculty you’ve given us so that we, in turn, can help others do the same.
sober us with the fact that our neighbor’s faith might hang in the balance.
